Ouch

How many of you can say with certainty what you were doing on a given day ten years ago? Twenty years? Thirty or forty years, or even fifty?

On Tuesday the 10th March, 1959 the Tibetan people rose up against the Chinese invasion of their country in what was to become known as the Lhasa Uprising. On this same day I had an altercation with a builder's lorry whilst hurrying to work on my 197cc Francis Barnett motorbike. The lorry won comfortably.

The young lady on the back of my bike was mercifully thrown clear. Myself and the bike finished up underneath the lorry. After the impact, as the steam settled I vividly remember looking up at the lorry underside, too close to the hot exhaust for comfort. Actually comfort is completely the wrong word. I was pinned under the bike and I distinctly remember holding my breath in the mistaken belief that if I breathed it would be my last. I had passed so far under the lorry (from sideways on) that the wheels passed over the edge of my helmet. Was it luck, providence that I survived, you tell me. A posse of men were summoned, they lifted the lorry (who needs Superman, the British public are wonderful when they need to be) and I was pulled clear.

My passenger received a serious laceration but fortunately nothing more. There seemed no lack of volunteers to examine her legs. I had a badly broken leg and ankle and less serious, as far as I knew, head injuries. (Who knows for certain whether they were accountable for some of my 'actions' over the past fifty years.) I remember some fool of a woman's audible comment 'Ooh, look at his face.' Consequently I refused to remove my arm from covering my face until I arrived at a hospital. Silly woman! The main feeling I remember is of acute embarrassment at the whole affair. I would have left the scene had I been remotely able. All in all not a day easily forgotten. The ride to hospital was uncomfortable in the extreme, a trip in the back of the lorry would have been less bumpy. But my surgery and treatment in three hospitals, brilliant. Hurray for the NHS.
Prior to this accident I fell off the bike or had near misses on several occasions. I was also in the habit of taking with me to work on occasion a young lad from Borrowash who, slightly younger than myself was also besotted with motorcycles. Being underage to own a motorbike, he could not wait to own a bike of his own, which he duly purchased on achieving the statuatory age for owning a motorcycle, that age being sixteen. Within weeks he was dead, killed instantly on colliding with a stationary lorry less than three miles from where I met my Waterloo. My interlectual capacity was even less then that it is now, but I could not help but wonder, why him and not me. Six months later, patched up, I returned to work. Not the job I had been employed in previously. March 10th, 1959 was one of the life defining days of my life.

As I sit at my computer all these years on my rebuilt appendage twinges in sympathy. I still have the helmet plus the marks made by the lorry tyres. Alas, I no longer have my youth. Stupid, wanton, foolish youth. so enjoyable, so unpredictable. But at least I'm still here, just! Have you swanned smoothly through the ages. Or have you had a life defining moment in your life that decided for you the path your life would take. Think about it and, whatever your beliefs, say a silent prayer.